Professor Robert Alter likes to read. As a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley for nearly 40 years, he's had plenty of time to do just that. During his tenure, he has seen schools of critical thought come and go. Structuralism, deconstruction, Marxist critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Foucault have all enjoyed periods of favor as the reigning lit-crit paradigm.
Robert Alter
Alter's latest book, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (Yale University Press), has enjoyed a glowing critical reception from both academics and the mainstream press. In it, Alter charts the development of the European novel from Flaubert to Kafka, arguing that a distinctly modern literary style emerged to cope with the vertiginous pace of growth and change in the cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alter calls that style "experiential realism," in which the voice of the omniscient narrator, epitomized in the novels of Balzac, gives way to a more subjective rendering of day-to-day experience.
In his introduction, Alter writes: "What I shall resist in my own procedure is the notion that literature is fundamentally a reflex of ideology." Too much literary criticism, Alter says, has attempted to circumscribe these novels as primarily a function of politics, measuring the degree to which the texts manifest a reactionary or progressive response to the new material realities of urban life in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. These politicized critiques, he writes, fail to account for the "acute and original aesthetic sense" of the authors "manifesting itself in the medium of words." What Alter wants readers of Dickens and Bely, Woolf and Joyce to understand is that their novels aren't just passive vessels afloat on the ideological crosscurrents of their times. More than that, they represent an active re-imagining of the world by authors who forged new ways of writing to embody new ways of feeling.
Sitting in his book-lined office in Dwinelle Hall, Alter says that the transformation of Western Europe from mostly mostly rural to mostly urban societies raised fundamental questions for novelists. "How do you experience time and space? Is your sense of individual agency somehow compounded or diminished?" Part of Alter's inspiration to write about the city and the novel came from a trip he took to Sao Paolo in Brazil, a city undergoing the same kind of radical transformation now, he says, as European cities experienced in the 19th century.
"It didn't please me," he said, even as someone born and raised in the Bronx. "We've never had cities on this scale."In his book, Alter shows how each author develops an ingenious stylistic response to both the "tremendous concentration of energies" and the alienating anonymity of the 19th century's jarringly new--and enormous--urban landscapes. He hopes his analysis will help readers better appreciate how innovative these books were in their time--and, as a result, help them rediscover the profound enjoyment of reading these novels.
"It's a profoundly emotional and immediate experience," Alter says. Too many scholars, he says, have lost that sense of connection with the literature they study. "If you lose a sense of that, then you might as well be selling insurance."
As an antidote, Alter starts all his classes by reminding students of Vladimir Nabokov's dictum: "Literature should be read from the base of the spine." Too much ideologically driven criticism, he says, fails to account the essential concreteness of literary imagery, which he calls "the life of a work of literature."
To illustrate his point, Alter quotes the description of the monster Leviathan from the book of Job: "His eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn."
"Anything you say about that," Alter says, "has to start with the experience of catching your breath at the amazingness and daringness of that image."
Alter is also a professor of Hebrew at Berkeley. He says he approaches the Bible not as a theologian but a student of literature. In 2004, Alter published a translation of the five books of Moses that generated much acclaim and controversy. Whatever the response, the most important fact for Alter is getting the discussion outside the walls of academia and into the minds of a broader audience. His sense of literature's immediacy carries with it an egalitarian streak. Most of his writing appears in publications for general audiences, including reviews that have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Commentary.
"I don't think that caring about literature is or ever should be the provenance of departments of literary studies," he says. Instead, he says, he hopes all readers of good books come away with a sense that "there's now going to be an added dimension to my life."
– Marcus Wohlsen